This talk is addressed to those beginning library work as a life work. This connects “library work” with two significant phrases, “those beginning” and “as a life work”.

This phrase “as a life work” suggests what is perhaps the chief value of a library school training. The distinction of and main justification for all kinds of higher education is that such education aims to put the student in position to view his work to be done as a whole, and life as a thing to be wrought out as a whole, not to be lived from hand to mouth. Presence at a library school means that the student has had foresight enough to be willing to spend energy, money, and a good bit of that most precious capital time, in sitting down to draw plans for his life building as a whole instead of starting in to build by rule of thumb.

There are however in this matter two factors—one’s self and the library. In order to sketch out one’s life work as librarian and live it, one must needs first know what libraries are, what they are capable of becoming and how one can best apply such knowledge and energy as one may have to making these libraries accomplish what they were intended to do for human society. This involves looking at libraries as a whole as well as at one’s life work as a whole, and the task of the library school is to give this view of the situation. In the last analysis this is the most important thing which any technical school does for one, this giving the vision of the whole of experience in one’s chosen field in order that one may draw his life plan in view of it. And for that matter, the task of technical education does not differ in this regard from the task of general education, which is simply the vision of the whole of human experience, as a whole, with reference to one’s own life among all kinds and conditions of men.

As therefore the field of science and general activities is the Universe, so the field of library science and education is libraries—libraries top and bottom, inside and out, beginning, middle and end and looked on as a whole.

On the other hand the phrase “those beginning” suggests the facts that you are yourselves at the beginning of a course of study, that the school year is at its beginning, that this New York Public Library school itself is still in its beginnings and that library schools in general are only in their beginnings. This in turn suggests as the topic of this talk three aspects of the matter of library beginnings: the beginnings of libraries themselves, the beginnings of library science and the beginnings of schools for library science. This talk will touch briefly, towards the end, on the two latter topics, but will have chiefly to do with the beginnings of libraries.